Pacanow 1883, A Survey of Births

by C. Michael Eliasz-Solomon

Stanczyk wanted to take another look at the church records in Pacanow. Recently, I was emailed by a Zwolski ancestor whose Jan Zwolski had married a Petronella Elyasz[sic]. So I went combing through the Zwolski records and sure enough I found a Petronella Elijasz married to a Jan Zwolski. There was a lot of synergy in the names of witnesses and God Parents too.

So I decided to do a survey of the 1883 Births of Pacanow for these “marker” families to see if I might find some female Eliasz/Elijasz ancestors and possibly some male Eliasz/Elijasz witnesses. At the end of this article I put together a table of people, places and dates of this little synergistic community within the Pacanow parish.

I was surprised at how well this little experiment had worked. Now wrapping my brain around the translation/transliteration of proper nouns from Russian/Cyrillic to Polish (or English) is not my idea of fun so I never did a survey of the Russian church records, like I did for the pre-1868 Polish records of Biechow (Pacanow does not have any pre-1868 records that have been microfilmed by the LDS).

So here is what I did. I looked at Elijasz (or Heliasz if any) in the indexes as usual, but now I also noted the records with: Zwolski, Siwiec, Odomski, Pytka, Zasucha, Paluch, Wojtys and for good measure, Zdziebko. Now that last one I added for my good friend, the famous genealogist Ceil Jensen, whose ancestors just happen to inhabit the same parish as my ancestors. Now keep in mind that this survey was just one year and just for the births.

The experiment worked, I found an Elijasz female and one Elijasz male mentioned in records that were indexed by the other “marker” families. Some people call these aligned or affiliated family names. I prefer the analogical thought that these are genetic markers for Elijasz (and on some deeper level this is true). I have joked for a few years now that the Elijaszow are related to all of the families in Biechow and Pacanow parishes. I even take note of these “parish names” when I come across them in the USA records in Buffalo, Toledo, and Detroit in particular, but other US cities as well. They are still good genetic markers for Eliasz/Elijasz even in the USA even more than a century later.

I did not find any Leszczynski or Wlecialowski, but to be fair, I seldom find them in the LDS microfilm. I did find a few other “marker” families that I had neglected to survey in the go around. I found Janicki, Janowski, Luszcz, Major and Kordos too. So these family names are also heavily intertwined with the original list. In fact, I think I found a few misspellings that are actually really in my list, but were misspelled. Now I cannot prove this, but I will build a little database and publish it to my website and see if any genetic marker families ping me about being related.

So I guess when you look at indexes, do not just fixate on your direct descent family name. At some point go back and look for your “marker” family names in the indexes and search those records as well. You too may find some extra nuggets of family gold. At the very least you may find some female ancestors who tend to get lost when they marry.

Oh, that Zdziebko experiment. It appears that Ceil’s Wojciech Zdziebko married one of my “marker” families, Jano{w}ski, and he had a child with Marianna Janoska. So even the Zdziebko’s are just one degree away from my ancestors – but no direct connection.